All this while, it is not as if I was sitting in a corner overthinking, not participating in life as such. There were moments I felt ready to begin something new. I wanted to create an AI-based personal stylist called My Zen Closet. I did pilots, was invited by friends and families into their homes to take a look at their closet and help them figure out what looked good on them – what to buy, what to discard. I learnt a lot, hired a great intern, built a good thesis. But then doubt took over. Is it really easy to “product-ize” this? Is it too abstract to build an app around this? I started looking for plot holes in my startup saga, as it were, to justify to myself why my idea, my approach, and my thinking was just not good enough to build a unicorn. Then I used the justification that fashion purchase frequency is not high enough to build something that will induce habit creation. Let’s start targeting groceries. I was so excited, I would go to a co-working space every day, figured out how to use a no-code platform to build only to give up saying the platform was not customizable and lacked features to build a robust app! I even applied to a couple of roles in a state of panic but ended up cancelling interviews or not clearing them. I’d dip my toes in, then retreat. I’d gather energy, then stall.
I would retreat but not sit and sulk. I would try to make full use of the perceived work flexibility – have leisurely meals, spend time with my son (although not mindfully), and decide to spend time enriching myself by learning new things. But I was deeply dissatisfied with my life, and it started showing up in my health too.
My husband had always been very supportive through my ups and downs, but one day quietly said, “This is not how startup founders work.” I wanted to argue back – who’s to say how founders should behave? But it also jolted me into reflection. I’d been treating this founder journey as my chance to embrace flexibility, freedom, flow. He was saying: take this seriously. Be in the moment. Take that first step and the next and the next. And his favourite line “Show up every day and give it time.” That was the real freedom – not just to do what you want, but to do it with commitment. This realization changed the energy I was bringing to the table – that showing up did not need a certain outcome, but needs care and consistency. Outcome would follow if we controlled the quality of our input.
This rhythm of emergence and retreat and reflection – I now see it for what it was: a recalibration.